Talk:Warren Goldfarb

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[edit] Speedy deletion

I believe Warren Goldfarb is notable, under several of the criteria at Wikipedia:Notability (academics)#Criteria:

• He is regarded as a significant expert and as a notable person by independent academics in his field.
• He has published a significant and well-known academic work, to wit, his book on the classical decision problem with Dreben, and perhaps others.

There may be other applicable criteria, but this should be sufficient.

Please remove the speedy-deletion tag.

Thanks, -- Dominus (talk) 01:10, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

• I believe the speedy delete did get removed just now, while I was looking at the links. I just want to confirm with my impression that the subject is at least not speedy-deletable; Goldfarb is not merely a ful professor in one of the two or there most prestigious departments in the country, in that subject, but he's a name professor. And his publication list looks impressive too, Godel's publisher would be protective of the collected works. So it's very likely that sufficient notability will be established (I'd be content with just what I've seen so far, myself). Pete St.John (talk) 01:29, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

I was the admin who removed the speedy (tho anyone but the author can do so, not just an admin). It was a totally improper speedy. Asserting that someone is a professor at Harvard is a clear assertion of notability, and it is not really necessary to look any deeper than that, as far as speedy is concerned. I assume it was just an error by the usually reliable guy who tagged it. Mistakes happen. As for real notability, it is inconceivable that harvard would appoint someone to a named chair unless thee was a great deal of supporting material; David E. added some. There would be no harm in adding his most cited papers, for articles in excellent peer-reviewed journals that are heavily cited is how t the academic world judges notability as a researcher. But it does help to write a fuller article at first, to avoid mistakes. DGG (talk) 15:51, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

In all honesty, I initially saw that he was a Harvard grad, but not that he was faculty. The article, at the time I speedied it, did NOT say that he was in a named professorship. Notability of generic faculty (even at Harvard), as you all know, is a somewhat iffy matter. --Orange Mike | Talk 16:08, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

I thought the speedy was reasonable; in my note on Wikipedia Talk:WikiProject Mathematics#Warren Goldfarb I said specifically that I agreed that I had not established notability in my stub. So I think we can count this as a success all the way around: everyone did something reasonable, and the outcome was the correct one.

Thanks for your attention to this matter. -- Dominus (talk) 16:20, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Another news story

Two Are Tied for Top Score in State Scholarships Tests, Robert H. Terte, New York Times, February 25, 1965. I don't have free access to this article, unfortunately, so I can't tell easily how it relates, but it came up on a news search for Goldfarb. Maybe he's one of the two students? —David Eppstein (talk) 04:46, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Classical decision problem

I made a choice when I wrote the article not to link "classical decision problem" to decision problem. The decision problem article is about decision problems in their full generality, meaning any problem that can be phrased in terms of acceptance by a Turing machine. But "classical decision problem" is much more specific. It refers to the problem of finding the maximal decidable classes of formulas of first-order logic. The decision problem article doesn't treat this at all, and so I thought it would be better to link to a correct article that doesn't exist yet rather than to include a misleading link to a mostly-irrelevant article that does exist. -- Dominus (talk) 14:57, 7 February 2008 (UTC)